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United States Army Corps of Engineers
The Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is more about engineers than it is about Army. Almost all of the tens of thousands of people in the huge organization are civilians. Only a few of the commanders are actually soldiers. They build things. Big things. They build things like dams, levies, locks, and bridges. Sometimes, they even build things in war zones like Iraq where they have been building, and rebuilding, and rebuilding the same pipeline for three four years. They expect to have it working within three years, "barring unforseen additional improvised explosions on the line." History The Corps was started by George Washington who hired a bunch of French engineers to build a bridge across the Delaware river during the War for Independence. The French engineers gave up on the bridge, however. "It's way too cold," they complained. Washington was forced to cross the river in a row boat. In that past, the Corps showed a marked distaste for curves in river-ways. The Corps became the world's foremost experts at straightening out awkwardly meandering rivers. This is thought to be one of the few positive reflections of the Corp's French heritage. Until after the Vietnam War, all Corps engineers used the manual Le transformer dans la Seine as their guide to river management. They were taught to make all American rivers look like the Seine in Paris. In the 1970s, the Corps allowed amusement park companies to bid on many of their early blueprints and models for river management. These models became the basis for all "Water Works" parks that have opened throughout the country since then. In fact, the Corps also built the Water Works property in Monopoly board games. (But not Electric Company, which was built by a Halliburton subsidiary.) The early Corps method of river management forced the river's water into chutes by building levies along the banks. This made the rivers deeper and faster and kept them from being clogged up with a nasty thing that they called "sediment." In places where sediment was still a problem, the Corps would dredge out the muck and dump it onto swamps that were then sold to housing developers for lovely river-front''River-front:'' aka "flood plain" sub-developments. Environmentalist land grab Because he was concerned with other matters at the time, President Richard Nixon allowed the Corps to succumb to pressures from Communist groups like the Sierra Club. The Corps "reexamined" its past management practices and claimed that swamps were now a good thing that would be called "wet lands." The Corps even started to agree with the environmental lobby that a few curves in rivers could be a good thing. This stole even more land from the hands of developers. The Corps built a huge new bureaucracy that requires a Communist document called a "permit" whenever a big-box retailer, housing developer, or factory-builder wants to clean out a swamp somewhere. It requires Freedom-loving corporations to pay millions for a French process called "mitigation" whenever God and The Market tells them to build something in a swamp. This became the basis for the biggest Communist land-grab in American history that has only recently been stymied by the Greatest President Ever and by Freedom-loving corporations. The Bush solution When the Greatest President Ever became President, many Republicans and corporate campaign contributors expected him to fire all of the permit-stamping drones at the Corps. But after a series of secret meetings with experts from the building industry, Vice President Dick Cheney suggested a "cleaner" option. Based on the Veep's extensive three-year and $3-billion career in the private sector, Cheney suggested letting the Corps bureaucrats keep their jobs but redesign the flow charts. "It works in the Private Sector," he mumbled. While the new process still requires builders to file for permits and issue reports on "mitigation," the new structure assures that the paper work will be caught up in an endless cycle of "reviews" within the Corps. "Nobody's gonna notice when they actually build something," Cheney reportedly told his chief of staff, Scooter Libby. "We made sure of that." Hurricane Katrina The Army Corps came under intense criticism after a few gallons of water allegedly "overtopped" some Corps-built levies and flowed into some parts of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Also allegedly, a couple of levies broke in a few places. But when they took the Chevy to the levy, the levy was dry. Dang liberal media. Until they were reigned in, some in the Corps tried to blame the administration of the Greatest President Ever for what happened in New Orleans during the hurricane. They pointed out that the Bush administration had removed money for levy maintenance from a budget. But wiser talking-heads soon prevailed and pointed out that the money wouldn't have been spent before the hurricane anyway, so whatever happened wasn't Bush's fault. It was Bill Clinton's fault. Notes